Music isn’t exactly his life, but it’s been important to artist Tim Bavington, even as a teenager. “I don’t know how it is for kids these days, but music used to seem so much more important to your identity,” said Bavington, who grew up in England before moving to California, and then Nevada. “You were either a punk or a mod. Everyone was in tribes in England back then.”

And Bavington’s tribe?

I was between a punk and a mod,” a bemused Bavington replied, on the phone from his studio in Las Vegas.

Bavington was a successful commercial artist (his credits included “The Simpsons”) who 10 years ago quit his day job when — much to his astonishment — his abstract paintings started selling. They even ended up in places like New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Since 2002, much of Bavington’s vibrant, color-infused work has been based on rock songs and inspired by musical ideas (such as using a scale of colors). Some of his most recent pieces are now on exhibit at Scott White Contemporary Art in Little Italy.

Here are several works that are representative of his style.

Above: “Ball & Biscuit” (2011)

“There’s a piece in the museum in San Diego (the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) called ‘Roll With It,’ and it has some light bands and some darker bands, which are the treble and bass. Lately, what I’ve been doing more of is color exploration. So I’ll use a piece of music to start, that hasn’t changed, but some of the color things I now do differently. Something you can easily do in Photoshop is turn an image negative, and then use that as a color study. In ‘Ball & Biscuit’ (from the White Stripes), it’s a Jack White (guitar) solo split. The bottom half is a negative of the top.”

Above: “Changes I” and “Changes II” (2011)

“All of the ‘Changes’ (series) are the same composition with different color waves. One of the earliest artists I was a big fan of in abstraction was Ad Reinhardt. His art was one of the things that led me to choosing to do this kind of work. The thing I thought was so great about Ad Reinhardt was how he spent 12 or 13 years, the last part of his life, doing just 5-foot canvases that were black on black grids; the same thing, over and over.

“And early on, I thought, all the things are done. … Is there something I could do a show of, or work in? Could I commit to doing something I could do over and over? So ‘Changes’ is a little of that; there’s a bit of Ad Reinhardt there. I just love that idea; to do the same thing over and over.”

Left: “Manic” (2011)

“It’s the Jimi Hendrix solo from ‘Manic Depression.’ I just couldn’t bring myself to use the word depression in the title; it would be giving away too much. I’ve started, in the last couple years, to get things more atmospheric, more spatial. I’m loosening it up.